Twitter

July 17, 2012

Much has been written about the role of the internet and social media in the Arab Spring last year, particularly in Egypt, where protestors organized and communicated on Facebook and Twitter. But while global connectivity can help protestors overthrow dictators and tell the world their story, it also gives everyone access to the less-inspiring corners of the web. That was on display this past week during Hillary Clinton’s visit to meet with leaders in Egypt.
You may have read about the protests that greeted the Secretary of State in Alexandria.

June 29, 2012

Editor’s Note: We’ll be running the article recommendations of our friends at TNR Reader each afternoon on The Plank, just in time to print out or save for your commute home. Enjoy!
Rotten Apple: New York is the best city in the world ... unless you are a poor child.
NYRB | 18 min (4,454 words)
The American Dream? Well, not exactly. Still, there is nothing quite like a buffalo hunt.
The American Scholar | 11 min (2,859 words)
Twitter may seem like the scrolling suicide note of Western civilization. But it has charmingly revived our culture's epigrammatic impulses.
n+1| 6 min (1,426 words)

June 22, 2012

ONE HAS LATELY heard much of the hashtag. That is, the Twitter symbol #, used to categorize a tweet. Charlie Sheen’s first tweet, for example, was famously: “Winning ..! Choose your Vice... #winning #chooseyourvice.” #Winning has gone on to live in irony across the Twitterverse, in mockery of the eternally less-than-winning Sheen. But even President Obama recently urged students to tweet their senators about raising the interest rates on federally subsidized student loans with the hashtag “#DontDoubleMyRate.”
The new thing, however, is using the word “hashtag” in conversation.

June 20, 2012

This morning, Bloomberg News released a poll that sent Twitter into a frenzy, showing Obama up by 13 percentage points, 53-40.
While these results might be promptly dispatched as an outlier, the Bloomberg poll was conducted by Ann Selzer & Co. of Iowa, an exceptionally well regarded pollster best known for conducting the famous Des Moines Register poll prior to the Iowa caucuses.

June 19, 2012

Editor’s Note: We'll be running the article recommendations of our friends at TNR Reader each afternoon on The Plank, just in time to print out or save for your commute home. Enjoy!
How strange is Fiona Apple? One magazine writer's quest to find out.
NY Mag| 29 min (7,349 words)
Sentenced to life in prison, Jon Yount became a gifted jailhouse lawyer and a crusader for prisoner rights.

June 06, 2012

James Taranto, in his Wall Street Journal "Best of the Web" feature, is taunting me for not replying to his tweet quoting with approval an African American minister (one who supports Sen. Scott Brown's re-election) making what Taranto obviously believes to be a devastating critique of Brown's opponent, Elizabeth Warren. To wit:
“Affirmative action—that issue becomes important because it points to who you are,” added the Rev. Jeffrey Brown, executive director of the TenPoint Coalition, who pointed to an assertion that she is 1/32 Cherokee.

May 09, 2012

You could practically hear the guffaws emanating from Twitter last night over the 41 percent vote share that Keith Judd, a federal inmate in Texas, managed to win in the Democratic presidential primary in West Virginia. And sure, there’s humor to be had in an incarcerated man winning a bunch of counties against the incumbent president of the United States. But was this outcome necessarily as telling and disastrous for Obama as the twitterati snark was making it out to be? Not exactly. As is so often the case, the punditocracy was willfully ignoring regional context.

May 04, 2012

When Chen Guangcheng departed the U.S. Embassy in Beijing on Wednesday with apparent guarantees that he would lead a safe and productive life in his native land, it seemed that a major international crisis had been averted. In a startlingly short period of time, American and Chinese officials had hammered out an agreement that seemed to protect Chen, while preserving the bilateral relationship.

April 27, 2012

When Representative Paul Ryan released his proposed federal budget for 2013, among the first provisions to attract the attention of critics was its choice not to renew the current interest rate of loans for low-income college students.

April 20, 2012

Did you know this blog had an RSS feed? Me neither! If you squint at this blog's Ben Shahn-esque logo (not the one on the home page, but the one on the blog itself) you will find, in the top left corner, an RSS logo that looks like an orange dreidel. Here it is magnified 1000 times (or thereabouts):
Click on that and it will take you to my RSS feed. The URL is: feed://www.tnr.com/rss/blogs/Timothy-Noah.
While I'm sharing such personal info, my Twitter feed is timothynoah1.
My Facebook page is here.
My author Web page is timothynoah.com. The "Articles" section now has an RSS feed to my blog!